Background: In my home LAN I have pfsense, freenas, asterisk and a HTPC all on their own box. The first 3 are on really old junk yard PCs and the HTPC is a pretty much brand new i3 machine with a flash graphics card and all that jazz.

Question: I can't help but think I can run my entire setup a hell of lot more efficiently if everything was centralised on a main server. I don't know the first thing about virtualising stuff so thought I would ask here. I have had a quick look around and found the MSI P67A-GD65. It has heaps of SATA ports, enough PCI slots and best of all it's cheap!! With that I was thinking a ~3GHz Core i5, fill up the RAM with 4gb sticks and then chuck in all my PCI cards. This is where I started wondering... is an i5 going to have enough grunt to run 3 lightweight OS's plus XBMC to be the HTPC? Would it be better to just run pfsense, freenas and asterisk on the central server and keep the HTPC as it is? And if I just run the 3 lightweights could I get away with a lighter (cheaper) processor? The other I guess I should ask is if I put the graphics card in can I make it only available to the XBMC part of the machine?.... I think I know that you probably can but again, total noob here. Oh and I was going to use vSphere Hypervisor for virtualising because it's free lol.

I've kept my HTPC as a separate box as it's got tuners etc, so you tend to need the hardware space. Although I could run it as a server (with something else as a client) and use it for a virtual server, but hey.

Then I have another box (home server in my sig) that runs vmware server 2.1 and it runs W7, windows 2003 x 2 copies and a linux machine. They can tend to bog each other down if ones is doing something intensive, but generally they work really well.

My primary desktop is that w7 instance and i have a work laptop that i rdp into the server or and of the vms.

Means for the price of 1 (well 2 machines) I can have 6 running, and I have a couple of other VM instances on the server but not running all the time.

If it needs custom PCI Hardware (tuner, analog phone card) or direct attached gear don't bother. While there is USB passthrough and the like you are setting yourself up for pain. Anything that requires 3D/Cuda/Hardware acceleration (e.g. HTPC) will not do well in a VM. Again, technically possible but ugly.

the main problem I have with my VM environment is disk speed. If you can afford the space I would recommend getting an SSD. RAM is the next most important to me however my box is maxed out at 16 gig so cant do much about that. Processor is last and is seldom busy doing much. If I had the coin I would get a seperate iSCSI NAS and run my VM's off that

The HTPC can stay how it is - mum & dad will have to buy their own lol. The only special thing in mine is the graphics card. MySky does a good enough job of recording TV for me lol.

I was going to use the two NIC's I have in the pfsense box in the new server so I can have it like I do now with a WAN & LAN. And then use the NIC on the motherboard to provide LAN to the other virtual machines. Is that the simplest way?

I don't have any special hardware in the Asterisk box so it should be good to go. It only has a maximum of 6 IP phones connected at any one time. Normally has only 3.

Definately will go for 16GB. Only 30 bucks for a 4gb stick so might as well.

And if people like the i5 then I will go for that as it is quite cheap and the only difference between that and the i7 is multithreading in the i7 the way I figure. Is that right?

Oh and for HDD's. I was planning on a cheap 60GB-ish SSD and divide it up for the OS's.

The only time the i7 pulls significantly ahead of the i5 is for really well written multithreaded software like media encoding. For regular office and day to day stuff it makes only a small difference.

Even with Adobe Bridge processing RAW files to Jpeg when I turn hyperthreading off it makes little difference. In Lightroom if you do parallel exports it can use more cores.